Hello, i have task to install a system for elderly person without much technical knowlegde (never used pc, no windows or mac).
They need text processing, calculator and maybe spreadsheet.
Want to disable anything else (setting panel, file browser, web browser, launcher, dock, terminal, login select, etc.) that not needed, all important thing only from desktop. Should not be able to go anywhere where not know what to do. But not permanent, might need to fix machine if ever break.
Is there distro or config i can work off? Or need to start from scratch? What program you recommend?
Thank you for any answer or recommendation
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My mom (85) has been using Xubuntu for some 10 years now. She uses Facebook and Gmail and plays card and puzzle games. She had no prior contact with computers, and learned it mostly by herself.
Just give thema stable solid distro. It will make their and your life easier.
I set up Bunsenlabs on both of my elderly parents computers and then basically automated login stuff to the sites they use, pinned those tabs. Blocked all ads and trackers. Set Firefox to auto open on boot. Basically made them a Linux version of a chrome book where everything they need is in the browser and already active, no mudding around.
8 months later zero complaints from either of them.
Maybe Aurora. It automatically updates, you can install everything via flatpak, and it’s pretty intuitive. Set up the admin account for you to do any maintenance, then set up a non-admin account for them to use.
It’s Atomic, though, so if you’re unfamiliar with ostree-based distros, it could be an admin headache for you when a problem arises.
I would probably go with bluefin. KDE is great, I myself use aurora on one of my devices, but it can also be kinda fiddley with all of it’s options.
The user has never even used a PC and therefore won’t profit from the familiarity that KDE’s default desktop layout provides. Gnome on the other hand offers a more simplified experience with few options and big icons. All of that might be an asset here. You can use menulibre to hide menu entries from the menu and use the official documentation to remove command line access: https://help.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/lockdown-single-app-mode.html.en
Plus it’s still atomic which I actually think is helpful here. For once all the important system stuff is read only. Secondly if one manages to screw something up you can just rebase.
That’s very true. I think Bluefin might be a better choice. Good catch!
Bluefin is GNOME on Fedora. It always changes and breaks stuff, Extensions maybe for the last time (was the change of how they should be written already?)
CentOS Bootc will be SO great. It will be the atomic rock stable workhorse that never ever breaks.
Also CentOS Stream 10 will get Plasma 6 afaik
Careful with gnome, it works for people that are unfamiliar with gnome, if you use extensions. Then gnome updates, the extensions break and you have to come over do maintenance, maybe use a different extensions which will look slightly different, throwing them off.
And yes I’m talking from experience. It’s bad because there is no easy fix for a broken extension, you essentially have to wait till the author fixes it. It was dock to dash in my example.
For old people you need point and click and the thing they have to click on should be permanently visible. They often do not understand the logical separations with virtual desktops and things showing up on screen only sometimes can be confusing. It’s easier if they have an area that’s always the same.
just don’t use extensions. OP’s usecase doesn’t need them
And in KDE you can tweak it how you like.
Save the Wifi passwords unencrypted to the system, then you can use autologin without needing KWallet
Isn’t a file browser needed for browsing the saved documents and spreadsheets?
Not to mention that office suites (such as WPS, OpenOffice and LibreOffice) will inevitably pop up a file browser when the “Open” or “Save” buttons/menu items are clicked.
elementaryos is made for that sort of thing, its quite simple and friendly and you need to poke around it to get it to even be able to do more ‘advanced’ stuff. its among the most polished DEs ive seen design and user-experience wise.
and it is still linux so you can disable or otherwise restrict their user account from anything you don’t want them meddling with. like the settings app and stuff, try it out on a VM and you will get what i mean.
oh its based off of ubuntu lts so its solid
ChromeOS Flex
I get visits multiple times a month because a Eula or something shows up on phones or tablets asking them to accept whatever. You know, the stuff nobody reads and just clicks accept on. Old people sometimes have trouble discerning where messages come from, anything from a pop up to a disclaimer for an update is “my phone asking me something”.
Chrome OS is still corporate BS. They will manage to confuse people with legalese. I have elder neighbours come to me confused that were literal pages into that BS. I always tell them they can just accept everything google/microsoft/apple asks of them, but that’s the problem, they can’t tell where it’s coming from. To them it’s just a legal contract showing up when they wanted to read their mails, it’s scary and they rather want me to check everything is ok.
Aurora is better for them. No legalese pop ups, fully automatic updates(no “click to accept”, “when do you want to schedule the update” or even an info that an update happened). I just tell them to make sure they turn off their PC at night and they will boot into the update next morning, never being the wiser. It just works.
Regarding ChromeOS being corporate, it is nearly all open source. You have to login with a Google Account, but once in, you don’t have to use any Google products.
You can use Firefox, Fastmail, whatever you like.
I tried older relatives on Ubuntu and ChomeOS and for the less technical ones, ChromeOS was best.
For ones with confidence and a growth mindset to learn new things, Ubuntu was fine.
If in doubt, I would recommend ChromeOS.
chromeos is the correct answer. It maintains itself. Also, using gdocs, gaheets, etc., you dont have to deal with backups, “lost files”, etc.
Get them a nice Chromebook then. Chrome os flex isn’t quite the same
No way. Then better use FydeOS.
Note that while ChromeOS is really really nice, beautiful and intuitive, it has like no support for running apps normally. You get Android apps and Debian in a container.
The performance sucks, you should setup unattended-upgrades.
But yeah, after that it could be great. If they never touch the terminal they cant break anything.
And while you can run Android and debian browsers (I tried Android Mull and Brave, and Debian Firefox and Brave both from their official repos), Chrome is always there and mostly the default I think.
Depending on use case it doesn’t sound like that’d be an issue. I used one of the like 3rd generation Chromebooks for school, I had to rdp for visual studio and Photoshop but it was perfect for everything else
The support for running apps in the Linux container feels fairly normal. I had a family member using LibreOffice and other apps that way for years and it worked fine. We bought a more powerful Chromebook and performance was fine. One family member is using ChromeOS on the Framework laptop. Performance there is great.
FydeOS is a de-Googled ChromeOS based in China.
https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/news/fydeos-vs-chromeos-flex-which-is-right-for-you/
Unattended upgrades is for updates in the Linux container. Sometimes it’s used primarily for security updates. The whole thing is so locked down and containerized, I don’t think security updates in the container are as important.
It’s true that Chrome always installed, but you can put whatever icons in your launcher.
I’m not sure about changing the default browser.
Yes, I know. She has a Framework Chromebook? Or do you actually run ChromeOS Flex on a Framework?
Both options are… interesting XD
Yes I would enable complete auto upgrades for the container. Maybe that could be hacked a bit by placing desktop entries somewhere.
Linux apps are running in a virtual machine that runs a Container. But they have access to storage, so it is relevant.
But I agree that ChromeOS is really well made. But a Tracking Hell full of Google too.
FydeOS is the only one you can use with a local account. Not even Android sucks that much.
You’ve gotta ask does an old person care more about Google spying on them or being able to use a computer as easily as possible
As much as I dislike Google I feel you really made a decent suggestion here.
Pop!_OS or something like Bazzite would be decent choices.
Are we expecting this old person to suddenly embrace their leet gamer skills
Have you considered providing them with a typewriter, ledger and calculator instead?
Maybe try the Atomic version of Fedora Budgie? With my limited testing it looks like a really easy and (almost) unbreakable distro.
Otherwise uBlue has allot of images, you can make your own even.
Mint or fedora workstation is very user friendly
